Iranophobia and Obama the
cyber-warrior By Kaveh L
Afrasiabi
United States President Barack
Obama, the relentless drone warrior, has a new and
proud hat: the cyber-warrior. Hitherto cloaked by
a thinning facade of engagement with America's
adversaries, the emperor has no clothes, with
scandalous foreign policy decisions exposing a
rogue essence to which the new undeclared
cyber-war against Iran can now be added.
Last Friday, the US media ended a month
filled with rapid velocity volleys by America's
Iran-bashing "desire machine", to borrow a term
from the French authors Deleuze and Guattari, with
the revelation that Obama personally orchestrated
the dangerous
cyber-attack on Iran's
nuclear facilities known as Stuxnet, [1] in direct
violation of international law and the UN Charter,
as well as US laws that require congressional
authorization for an act of war. Indeed, the news
ought to jolt some members of US Congress to the
importance of updating the War Powers Act in tune
with the changing nature of contemporary warfare.
"People in Iran ask, is this the same
Obama who offered the olive branch of dialogue and
civility to Iran in his nowruz [Iranian New
Year] messages? Obama has lost all credibility
with the Iranian people now," said a Tehran
University political science professor who spoke
on condition of anonymity, describing the news
regarding Obama's hand in the Stuxnet attack on
Iran's nuclear infrastructure as "an act of war
that should be condemned by the international
community".
The cyber-attack and other
technologies of sabotage and control used with
such facility by Obama may be cutting edge but the
underlying discourse is purely pre-modern and even
medievalist, ie Machiavellian through and through.
As such, Obama is hostage to the past with no
prospect for real evolution, pinned to an ideology
of Western domination pure and simple.
In
this asymmetrical, technologically savvy
contestation of power, the US's combination of
soft and hard power is insatiably geared to the
satisfaction of a modern totalitarian system
nicely cloaked as "the world's greatest democracy"
and legitimated by a whole array of "state
apparatus" including the think-tanks and
universities routinely dishing out legitimating
discourses.
Unlike past totalitarian
systems, written about by Hannah Arendt and
others, the new American totalitarianism sustains
its military adventurisms abroad in the name of a
global "higher good", thus appearing as the
custodian of ethics and morality, with deafening
declarations of righteousness on the right to
intervene in other countries in the name of
combating genocide and countering nuclear weapons
proliferation. Lacking from these endeavors is the
slightest concern about the cognitive dissonance
of simultaneously backing authoritarian and
rights-abusive regimes, propped up to safeguard
America's "vital interests".
Indeed, in
analyzing the mindset of Obama the drone and cyber
warrior, in the rogue behavior of transgressing
other nation's sovereign rights one must take into
account the modern history of America's "imperial
presidency," the hegemonic temptations to dominate
and cajole into line the recalcitrant lesser
powers, the obsessive neurosis of targeting the
'"hostile other", the infections of Israel's
expansionism, the pathological non-disarmament
entwined with flagship of counter-proliferation
and instrumentalization of world institutions, and
the like. Taken altogether, these speak of a major
global malady that cannot be remedied until and
unless there are new and effective barriers to
unipolar American hegemony, which nowadays is
basking in the ramifications of a weakened Europe
forced to sheepishly toe Washington's line on all
major international issues.
In this
context, it would be nearly impossible for
Washington to bring to a closure its addictive
Iranophobia, to take appropriate steps to end the
Iran nuclear standoff, and to discontinue its
exploitation of the Iran nuclear crisis for the
sake of its vast military-industrial complex. The
red line of capitalist profitability would be much
maligned if the Iran nuclear talks somehow were to
succeed and culminate in a normalization of
US-Iran relations, thus depriving US defense
contractors of billions of dollars of arms sales
to regional allies in the Middle East who need the
American protectorate power. It is better to keep
throwing monkey wrenches in the wheels of
negotiation to set it back and thus keep the
crisis going rather indefinitely.
Again,
the problem must be analyzed on multiple levels,
including political psychology, political economy,
geostrategy, and the like. This is important
because one must ask why Obama would commit the
serious tort of cyber-warfare and sabotage in Iran
when his own intelligence community is on record
that Iran's nuclear program has been peaceful
since 2003? And, indeed, what explains the
peculiar timing of this public disclosure only a
couple of weeks before the crucial Iran talk in
Moscow scheduled for June 18 and 19?
Certainly, this is not intended to
convince Iran that it can trust Obama and vest any
hope for a better treatment than his predecessors.
The news regarding Obama's presidential directive
for the Stuxnet attack on Iran follows a string of
other Iranophobic media pieces - eg, American
claims that Iran has been plotting the
assassination of US diplomats, and that Iran has
been razing buildings at Parchin military complex
suspected of nuclear weapons-related
experimentations (some 12 years ago!). All these
reflect a systematic pattern of media-based
planned Iranophobia with new accusations against
Iran on a monthly or bi-weekly basis.
According to the Tehran professor
mentioned above, the coincidence of new
cyber-attack on Iran, known as Flame, with the
revelations on Obama and Stuxnet "simply
reinforces the suspicion that the US, working with
Israel, is behind this new attack as well. Some
people in Iran are now wondering why Iran
continues to have dialogue with a sworn enemy that
has declared war on it in so many repugnant ways?"
Without doubt, there is a growing Iranian
cynicism concerning the futility of diplomatic
engagement with the US and its Western partners,
echoed by, among others, the former president Ali
Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who according to the
Iranian media pointedly asked President Mahmud
Ahmadinejad if Iran was gaining anything by
participating in those talks? Similarly, many
pundits in Iran have been making the point that
while it is in Obama's favor to continue the
nuclear talks, Iran has no similar interest since
Obama and the entire US government have committed
themselves to the Israeli red line of stopping
Iran's nuclear enrichment program.
"Why
should Iran do any favors to Obama, who has done
nothing for Iran except setting up formidable
sanctions, attacking Iran's nuclear infrastructure
and scientists, and threatening Iran by constantly
claiming the window of diplomacy is closing? Iran
is now on the verge of shutting down that window
and letting the chips fall where they may," said
the Tehran professor, who discounts the
probability of a US and/or Israeli strike on Iran
since that would cause a "regional conflagration
and hurt the world economy including US and
Europe."
This may not be such a bad
strategy after all and hardly a case of
brinksmanship. Iran is now so disgusted with Obama
that may just walk away from negotiations no
matter what, and the question is if Obama can
truly afford that?
Notes:
1. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuxnet
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